A few weeks ago my church played a small role in shutting down a crack house – but only after we had almost contributed, albeit inadvertently, to its continuance. Community Assessment, a Charlottesville, Va., group to which needy local residents can apply for assistance, called our church seeking financial aid for a woman about to be evicted. Based on the information that Community Assessment had gathered, the need appeared to be legitimate and our church's benevolence director pledge $175. She then called me because the needy woman lived in the neighborhood where our church's new urban ministry is based. I direct that ministry, but I didn't recognize the woman's name. However, as soon as we drove into the complex, I realized she lived in the most notorious crack house in the neighborhood – a house many of us had been complaining about for months. Chagrined, I kicked myself for not having made the connection earlier.
Fortunately, our church, along with other churches contacted by Community Assessment, had not yet sent the woman any money. After checking with neighborhood leaders and the police to confirm that this woman was in fact an active dealer, I instructed my church and the others to give no aid. Since the woman had been counting on the churches' combined pledges of several hundred dollars, she couldn't pay the back rent and was evicted.
Like many other front-line participants in the fight against urban poverty, I believe today's popular call for the government to turn over responsibility for welfare to churches and private groups is basically sound. State-sponsored welfare programs have failed, largely because government provides only material aid, not spiritual help, and does so in a bureaucratic, de-personalized fashion.
As Marvin Olasky, author of The Tragedy of American Compassion, has reminded us, private charities in the 19th century knew better how to help the needy. They attended to poor people's spiritual as well as physical needs, and they worked in face-to-face, long-term relationships with poor people, providing emotional support, practical training, and moral challenges. Everyone but the far left seems to agree that we should return to that approach. And we've started to: Governors in Michigan, Mississippi, and Virginia have actively solicited churches' help in overhauling the welfare system.
The problem with that approach is that it assumes that churches today care for the poor as effectively as they did 100 years ago. Unfortunately, many churches, synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship basically copy the government's approach: They provide the poor with food, clothing, and emergency financial aid, but with little personal attention or follow-up. Clearly, welfare reform inside churches must accompany the welfare reforms emerging from state capitals.
Churches have a long history of doing mercy ministry the right way. Sixteen centuries ago, Gregory of Nyssa taught that "mercy is a voluntary sorrow that joins itself to the suffering of another." That is the key to helping people escape poverty. Church employees and volunteers must get eyeball to eyeball with the people they are helping and share the load. However, that requires changing some churches' approach.
The "bigger is better" mentality must go. Churches must not evaluate the effectiveness of their community outreach by the number of people they serve, but by their ministries' success in lifting families out of economic dependency. Too many churches are doing much and changing nothing; their outreach is a mile wide but only an inch deep. They are not helping poor people transform their lives; they are merely enabling the poor to cope a little better with their dysfunctional lives. This Band-Aid approach also lets church congregants off the hook too easily. The Bible instructs Christians to "Lay down our lives for our brothers." Too often, however, our churches' mercy ministries allow us to write checks and give canned goods, while protecting us from experiencing the sights and smells of despair or the realities of poverty and violence.
Instead, churches must recapture a vision for serving the "whole" person. That requires both a willingness to exercise moral authority, and an accompanying – often grueling – commitment to earn the right to be heard. As I have walked ghetto streets in a dozen American cities, I've been struck by the ubiquitous juxtaposition of corner churches and corner drug dealers. Churches are perhaps the only social institutions left in the 'hood, but many in the underclass pay no heed to churches' moral teaching. The reasons for that are many and complicated, but a simple one is that many urban churches do not reach out to their neighbors. Congregants commute in each week, pastors live outside the neighborhoods, and local residents feel unwelcome inside the church.
Until churches embrace the suffering of the people around them, their moral admonitions are likely to fall on deal ears. Churches must begin to deal with real needs of the inner city by starting rehabilitation groups for drug addicts, providing day-care for working mothers, tutoring children, organizing neighborhood-watch groups, teaching unemployed adults the skills they need to secure and retain employment, and making other efforts to offer hope to the spiritually oppressed. Neighborhood residents must perceive that church members have taken on community woes as if they were their own. If community residents are persuaded that church members are genuinely concerned, they will be more receptive to the church's spiritual wisdom, moral teaching, and tough love.
When churches successfully make the shift from throwing money at the poor to building relationships with the poor, they begin to transform lives – both of the helpers and of the people being helped. Poor people start to feel that they are not merely some case number in a bureaucrat's files. They regain a sense of self-worth and confidence through their new friendships with people who are committed to helping them improve their lives by returning to school, getting sober, learning computer skills, kicking out an abusive live-in boyfriend – or doing whatever else it takes. They are given love and new opportunities; in return, they are expected to take responsibility for their actions and to eschew self-destructive behavior.
Church members who build friendships with poor people get exposed to life outside their middle-class enclaves. That shatters some of their inaccurate stereotypes and over time can reinvigorate their sense of civic responsibility towards "those people" in "those places" – primarily because "those people" are now their friends, people with real names and faces.
Philanthropic institutions can encourage this shift in at least two ways. First, they can examine their evaluation procedures. When donors ask grant recipients how many meals, nights of shelter, changes of clothing, or other physical "products" they provide to the needy, they encourage a conventional approach. When they judge recipients on their success in encouraging qualitative change in people's lives – as measured by such things as decreased welfare dependency, victory over drug addiction, or graduation from job-training programs – they inspire the kind of change in behavior that is likely to endure.
Second, donors need to invest more time in people than in buildings. Both are necessary, but people are more important and effective than buildings in ministering to the needs of the poor. In particular, donors can earmark funds to underwrite faith-based ministries' efforts to develop indigenous leadership in the communities they serve.
Our church is gradually learning what it is to share the sorrows of the inner-city neighborhood we have adopted. Had we not begun to build friendships in that neighborhood, we would not have known that the woman who sought our aid through Community Assessment was one source of the neighborhood's ruination. Those who give are obliged, like physicians, to "first do no harm." Churches do need to accept a greater role in caring for the needy. But they must do so according to the timeless wisdom of their own rich traditions, not by the tenets of contemporary benevolence – many of which have harmed, rather than helped, the poor.
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